Glad Tidings Submission Guidelines

Last updated February 6, 2024

In an effort to make the Glad Tidings more consistent and uniform — and therefore easier to read — and also fit more articles in, please note the following guidelines regarding submissions for Glad Tidings. These guidelines are meant to encourage conciseness, consistency, and legibility, not to limit you. We are having the very good problem of Glad Tidings emails being too long; we have a lot going on at Nativity and a lot to celebrate, and that is a wonderful thing.

For clarity "Glad Tidings article" refers to the actual text that goes in the Glad Tidings email, not including the heading.

Deadline

• The deadline for Glad Tidings submissions is Wednesdays at noon. We will make an effort to accommodate late submissions, but we cannot guarantee that articles submitted past the deadline will be included in that week’s announcements.

Format

Please send submissions in one of the following formats:

• Word Document (.doc or .docx) attachment
• Google Doc (make sure I have access by clicking “Share” at the top)
• Plain text in an email

I don’t have a Mac, so I cannot read Apple Pages (.pages) files. Please avoid sending PDFs, especially if they have images that you want me to use; images and text should be sent as separate attachments.

Length

• Glad Tidings articles need to be ~60 words or fewer.
• Articles that are longer than ~60 words will need to be a blog post.
• If you submit a longer article, that is ok, but please also submit a shorter blurb for inclusion in the actual Glad Tidings email, which then links to the blog. Think of the shorter blurb as a teaser of sorts. If you don't submit a shorter blurb in addition to a blog post, you will need to be okay with whatever I or ChatGPT come up with as a summary.
• To get a word count on Google Docs, simply click Tools > Word Count. A word count is automatically shown in MS Word on the bottom toolbar.

Images

• All articles in the email must include an image. I make extensive use of external images on the internet, as well as Unsplash for stock photos, as we have limited media storage capacity on iContact (our email distribution platform). If you don't include a link to an image, I will find one, but it would make my life a little easier if you include in your email submission a link to an Unsplash image or other image as the "featured image".

Links

• If your article includes hyperlinks (links to other websites, forms, etc), please try to make the sentence containing the link make semantic sense and include the link as part of the sentence, rather than just dumping the URL. I will tidy up articles before posting, but it will make things easier for me if you endeavor to do this before sending. Here's an example:
  
   "Please RSVP using this Google Form: https://docs.google.com/asdfkljhq2387489027qkjhdf2897"
  
   "Please RSVP using this Google Form."